Please join in this amazing experience to sing and hear these well known pieces with Mr. Harris accompanying on the instruments that would have been used in the 17th and 18th centuries. He will coach singers, discuss performance practices, and demonstrate various instrumental accompanying styles. Works from the famous 24 Italian Songs and Arias will be the focus, but any repertoire from the 17th century will be welcome.

Please email Prof. Joseph Gascho (jgascho@umich.edu) to participate in this class and to ask questions.

ABOUT THE GUEST ARTIST

LUCAS HARRIS leads a busy freelancer’s life as a lutenist, conductor, continuo player, teacher, lecturer, coach, researcher, and audio/video editor. His collection of nearly twenty plucked-string instruments includes various Renaissance & Baroque lutes/guitars as well as a theorbo, cittern, bandora, an 1831 Guadagnini guitar, and a 7-string electric guitar with a Floyd-Rose tremolo bar.

He discovered the lute during his undergraduate studies at Pomona College, where he graduated summa cum laude. He then studied early music at the Civica scuola di musica di Milano and at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen before beginning his freelancing career in New York City. For the past two decades he bases his activities in Toronto, where he serves as the regular lutenist for Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. He is a founding member of the Toronto Continuo Collective, the Vesuvius Ensemble (dedicated to Southern Italian folk music), as well as the Lute Legends Collective. Lucas plays with many ensembles in Canada and the USA and has worked in recent years with the Helicon Foundation, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, The Newberry Consort, Les Délices, and Jordi Savall / Le Concert des Nations, and Early Music Vancouver. He teaches at the Tafelmusik Summer and Winter Baroque Institutes, Oberlin Conservatory’s Baroque Performance Institute, and the Canadian Renaissance Music Summer School. Also a choral conductor, Lucas has been the Artistic Director of the Toronto Chamber Choir since 2014 and has developed and conducted nearly thirty themed concert programs for the TCC. He has also been a guest director for the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, the Ohio State University Opera Program, Les voix baroques, Atalante, and the Toronto Consort. Lucas’s longstanding interest in women composers has resulted in many projects including the reconstruction of 12 solo-voice motets by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (the edition is now available for free download at the Web Library for Seventeenth-Century Music).

http://www.lucasharris.ca